Who this is for,
and who it is not
Better to settle the fit before you spend a call finding out. Here is who we do our best work with, and who we would send somewhere else.
You are probably a good fit if
- You lead a complex organisation, or a serious part of one: a government department, a national institution, or a firm whose delivery has outgrown its structure.
- You can admit the org chart is not how the work actually happens.
- You have one real problem with visible stakes: a programme that keeps slipping, a decision everyone can see and nobody can move, a restructure that changed nothing.
- You want your own organisation to work better on its own terms, and you want whatever we build to keep running after we have gone.
- You want us to say at the start what would prove the approach wrong, and you are willing to watch for it alongside us.
The common thread is not a sector. It is a leadership team ready to work on how the organisation actually operates day to day, not just how the org chart says it should.
We are not your people if
- You want a certified rollout of somebody’s branded operating model. That is not what this is, and we would be the wrong people to give it to you.
- You want a wall-to-wall transformation programme with a portfolio of workstreams and a last slide showing the whole organisation remade. We move one stuck decision at a time and leave; we do not run programmes like that.
- You want a consultancy that stays. If the improvement needs us in the room forever, we have failed by our own standard, and we plan our own exit from the start.
- You want the answer handed down from outside. We think the people closest to the work usually hold it, and our job is to run the conversation well, not to replace your judgement with ours.
- You need us to promise every rule will move. Some rules will not move however good the case, and we are suspicious of anyone who tells you they always can.
None of this is a criticism of those needs. They are just not the work we do, and pretending otherwise would waste your time and ours. If that is what you are after, we will say so on the first call and point you somewhere better.
Who you would actually be working with
Omnicomplexity is Chris Preece: the person who wrote the book and does the work. When you engage us, you get the founder in the room, not a pitch team who hand you to someone junior once the contract is signed. That is a real constraint as much as a promise. It means we take on the problems where senior, hands-on attention is the thing that matters, and when we are at capacity we say so instead of putting unfamiliar faces on your problem.
The career behind that is set out on the about page: decades leading change in emergency services, national programmes and UK central government, including the pandemic rebuild at Registers of Scotland, where he was one of the people inside it.
The cheapest way to check the fit
Read the first chapter of the book. If you see your own organisation in it, the conversation has somewhere to start; if you do not, you have only lost half an hour. It is the cheapest way to test whether our way of thinking fits your organisation before anyone books a call.
After that, a discovery call is thirty minutes, free, and carries no obligation. We will tell you on that call if we think you do not need us.
More questions, including the book, speaking and the Five Passes